Entertainment

How Social Media Has Changed Fashion Week

Fashion Week has experienced nothing short of a revolution — or evolution, if you will — over the last five years, largely due to the advent of social media.

What was once a series of exclusive events and parties for designers, buyers, media, models, celebrities and various hangers-on in the major (primarily Western) capitals of the world has now become a live global spectacle for consumers. Gone are the days of waiting for the next issue of Women's Wear Daily or Harper's Bazaar for the first news of seasonal collections — or even religiously refreshing Style.com 48 hours after a runway show.

Now, thanks to a cornucopia of new technologies, as well as public events like Fashion's Night Out, consumers are as much a part of Fashion Week as the so-called fashion elite.

Fashion Media Gets More Competitive

Social media has played the biggest role in how Fashion Week is covered by the media. Before laptops, digital cameras, Wi-Fi and blogging platforms like WordPress, there was a relatively long delay between when a runway show occurred and when that information was relayed to consumers. Even in the early '00s, the quickest way to get news about Fashion Week was through print industry publication Women's Wear Daily, which would showcase photographs of select looks alongside a review the day after the shows.

This started to change in 2005 and 2006, when a new breed of reporters, calling themselves "fashion bloggers," began entering the tents. One of those early pioneers, Julie Fredrickson, co-founder of fashion blogging network Coutorture (acquired by Sugar Inc. in 2007) and now manager of social and digital marketing at Ann Taylor, says that back then brands had little idea of who fashion bloggers were, but were "willing to roll with you so long as you were related to some sort of tenuous publication."

In fact, Fredrickson says she was able to get registered for her first New York Fashion Week in February 2006 "on someone else's random webzine." At the time, she was working in a furniture showroom as a way to pay her bills, and was able gain entry, laptop in tow, without any invitations. She'd then zip over to a Chipotle or the public library so that she could upload images and reviews immediately after the shows, ensuring that her content was up hours before that of any more established publication or website.

"The fact that you could see anything the first day, even a single photo, was really novel," Fredrickson says of fashion bloggers' early success. "Coutorture focused on getting photography up as fast as possible. Style.com was still 24 to 48 hours behind. As a result, we monopolized all of top searches on search engines," she explains.

Fashion bloggers have also dramatically improved the quality of the content around Fashion Week, Fredrickson claims. Blogs and mainstream media alike must now not only compete to be first, but to secure an interesting angle. "Instead of having a generic, two-paragraph writeup, you can now go to any number of sites that cover all kinds of minutiae, from where someone sat to what the runway music was like. It made everyone really up their games," Frederickson says.

Nowadays, "if you don't have video within a couple of hours, you're considered 'behind,'" she adds.

Frederickson recalls that starting in 2008 most of the bigger players, Style.com included, were beginning to get content up as quickly as the old guard of fashion bloggers. "The traffic spikes we saw initially on Coutorture [during Fashion Week] were enormous — quadrupling, quintupling. We didn't see traffic bumps once it got more competitive," she says. "Even though there's such a proliferation of information [about Fashion Week] now available, it doesn't necessarily mean people are consuming more of it. They're just focusing on different niches."

Yuli Ziv, founder and CEO of blogging network Style Coalition and co-founder of networking group Fashion 2.0 Meetup, made similar observations. "If you want to be a successful fashion blogger today, you have to pick your own niche, your own point of view, such as plus size, denim, or vintage. There's no point competing with the professional editor to review the collection. What bloggers can provide is a real person's perspective."

This year, crowdsourcing projects like Milk Made's Live at Fashion Week took another step forward on behalf of the media by extending opportunities to document Fashion Week to everyone. They encouraged Fashion Week attendees to submit photos from their mobile phones to live at milkmade.com to produce a visual, near real-time record of New York Fashion Week from all over the city.

New Opportunities for Brands

Brands are taking advantage of many of the same tools as the media. This year, more than 20 labels, including Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Vera Wang and Oscar de la Renta, hosted livestreams on their websites, often accompanied by widgets that allowed viewers to comment on the looks on Facebook, Twitter or on-site with each other in real time. Their view of the show was, in many cases, better than many of those sitting further back in the tents.

Besides livestreams, brands are also producing backstage video and photographic footage, and sharing it with their fans via their websites, their mobile apps and various social platforms. Tibi, a relatively young fashion label, has been posting behind-the-scenes photos (see above) from castings, sittings and other events and posting them to its Facebook Page for the last two shows, Graphics and Communications Manager Lacy Little tells us.

"It gives a broader perspective of the amount of work and vision that are put into these shows, and it gives our fans a great opportunity to see the creative environment that we produce the collection in. We're able to showcase the creative aspects and the faces behind the company, not just the garments you see on the racks," Little explains.

Fredrickson adds, "Fashion Week is a brands' opportunity to tell a coherent narrative for their season. Whether it's Tumblr, Facebook, or YouTube, they're going to use whatever makes most sense to present their vision for this season, to tell their story in the fullest possible way. Fashion is all about storytelling."

Fashion labels are taking advantage of other technologies, as well. Instead of the paper invitation system of years past, fashion show attendees can now RSVP to shows online and can scan their barcodes at kiosk stations in the tents to receive their seating assignments. Not only does it streamline the seating process, it also helps brands keep track of who actually shows up to their events, which they can measure against media coverage to determine the value of a particular invite.

More notably, brands are exploring ways to leverage Fashion Week buzz to pursue e-commerce opportunities. Both Oscar de la Renta and Burberry are making select pieces available for online purchase immediately after their shows on September 15 and September 21 respectively, months before they show up in retail stores. Burberry has even invited customers to watch the livestream in 25 of its physical stores worldwide. Visitors can watch the show on one of the many available iPads and use a custom-built app to purchase several items immediately afterward.

Oscar de la Renta CEO Alex Bolen said the company decided to test the new e-commerce opportunity after the success of its iPad covers, the first edition of which were sold exclusively online a few weeks after premiering at the company's resort show. (One was given away to the Foursquare Mayor of its flagship store.) "People wanted them and they wanted them right away," he said. "We shipped what we could, but we definitely missed business. For spring, Oscar [de la Renta] picked a key jewelry group [to] offer for immediate delivery." Bolen emphasized that the initiative was an "experiment," but that he expects more of these kinds of opportunities will come "not only from Oscar de la Renta, but from many fashion brands.”

Perhaps the most forward-thinking move of all came from designer Prabal Gurung, who premiered pieces of his Spring 2011 collection to online consumers at social styling platform Polyvore before the show. To honor the initiative, Polyvore is holding a contest for two tickets to Gurung's next runway show and a tour of his Garment District studio for the best ensemble created with the new collection. The winning sets will also be displayed on nytimes.com/tmagazine and T’s Facebook Page.

What This Means for Consumers

From livestreaming and crowdsourced coverage, to debuting and selling collections immediately online, Fashion Week is shifting from an event for media and buyers to a spectacle for consumers.

This trend is being reinforced by offline events as well. Fashion's Night Out, a now-international occasion in which consumers are invited to meet with designers and other fashion personalities at various retail venues, offers a new level of interaction for both parties.

It's a trend we expect to see more of as bigger media outlets turn to consumers to crowdsource their coverage of Fashion Week, and more brands debut their collections to consumers online before their official presentations.

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